Dancers  Chapter 3
by menme
Summary: He was in pain and the treatment was to toss her out... Chapter 3 of Greg and OFC Dani's story. No graphic sex, but some adult content. Strong warning for language


Dancers – Chapter 3 (_Winter_)

_A._

His voice mail - _New case, people, get on it_ - had been his usual terse, yet more irritable than it had been for months. As she entered the room she glanced at the chart the nurse handed her, searching out of habit for what might have caught his interest. The patient was female: convulsions, breathlessness, choking. Nothing out in left field diagnostically (she groaned, realizing she was thinking in sports metaphors). Profession: dancer. He had pushed to have the case assigned to him, the nurse had said.

The woman in the bed might have been beautiful once, but now she was too thin, face taut and sallow. She was perhaps fifty-five, vaguely Mediterranean. Another glance at the chart for the name. "Hello, Martha. I'm Dr. Cameron. I'll need to ask you a few quest -"

The door slid open. He hobbled in, followed by a young woman.

It was always the same. That little leap of the heart. On an EKG it would have been a spike. She might have convinced everyone it was gone - and it had shrunk while Warner was there, while week after week she watched him chase his ex-girlfriend with the obsession he reserved for hide-and-seek viruses - but it had returned with a vengeance when the woman left. Not even the rumors of a new girlfriend (Wilson for once adamantly silent on the subject) could make it go away.

He looked her up and down. "History?" The young woman had moved to the patient's side and was assuring her everything would be all right.

"I just got here."

He glanced theatrically at his watch. "Rocking toddlers in the leukemia ward again, huh?"

An inward cringe. He wasn't supposed to know about that, her devoting time to the cancer kids, something Wilson had turned her on to with a remark one day, how so many of the sickest whose parents worked spent their days alone with nurses too busy to do anything more comforting than prick them with needles. She had found that holding them, reading to them and - yes - rocking them loosened that knot inside her. Her secret for a month now, dreading the moment he found out, knowing his scorn would be so scathing she would probably spontaneously combust.

She met his gaze and it was soft.

He took the chart. "Convulsions." Flipped the bedsheet from the patient's legs. The young visitor had stopped talking to listen. She noted with one part of her mind that the woman was beautiful. Not a relative, she would bet, the skin paler than the patient's, though with the same small lithe body, just not dieted down to bones. Almost muscular.

The patient's leg twitched. "Since when are twitches convulsions?" he asked. "Unless we're in the Land of the Giants."

"It's what the admitting wrote."

He checked the admitting doctor's name. "Bornholm wouldn't know his ass from an MRI tube. Other symptoms?" He was actually talking to the patient, had even moved to the head of the bed, where he bent over the woman in a doctorly fashion. Things like that didn't happen. The world ought to end now. She followed his lead, waiting on the other side of the bed. He patted his pocket for a penlight, leaned over and stole hers, and examined the patient's eyes and throat.

"The twitches started three days ago," Martha told him. "Sometimes they last so long it hurts."

"More like spasms? Seizing up?" He pocketed her penlight. She reached across and took it back, noticing that the young woman watched them with a kind of amused fascination.

He checked the pulse and frowned. "Any heart problems?" The patient shook her head. "Get a stat monitor on her."

The visitor spoke up. "You mentioned choking, Martha. Be sure and tell him everything."

"Choking as in I-can't-breath?" He studied the patient. She nodded. "Or as in I'm-about-to-toss-my-last meal." He glanced down at her figure. "Which in your case was probably three days ago. Not a friend of food, are you?"

Martha's eyes narrowed. "I'm a dancer. I stay in shape."

Oddly, he turned to look at the visitor. She shrugged and said, "Par for the profession."

"Apparently."

He tested for a Chvostek sign, tapping the patient's jaw with a finger. It was positive. At each tap, left then right, that side of the woman's face twitched.

She said, "Tetany," before he could. Always that need to impress. He nodded.

"Tetanus?" The young woman sounded shocked. "Where would she have gotten it?"

It was easy for a layman to confuse the two. She felt sorry for the visitor. He would roast her now, serve up some gratuitous slur on her intelligence, or just roll his eyes at her in that way that so eloquently said, _Why me? Why dumb people?_

And in the next instant she couldn't believe what she was hearing. He was explaining. Patiently.

"Tetany, not tetanus," he told the visitor. "Both present with muscle contractions, but tetanus is caused by a toxin. Tetany's caused by some underlying condition. The cell membranes' gateways are staying open. The nerves can't shut up. Sort of like old ladies at a church lunch." He turned. "Do a Trousseau just in case. Excuse my French. And check for renal failure." She nodded.

"Then it's her kidneys?"

She wanted to groan. The woman wouldn't stop, but then she didn't know he had a line, and that she had crossed it.

"No," he said quietly, and again she felt that tweak of surprise at his patience. "Both are symptoms of something else. Hypocalcemia, parathyroid, pancreas." His voice was almost gentle. "We'll find it."

Of course. Beautiful woman. She should have seen it earlier. He was trying to impress the visitor. With his bedside manner. He who had no manners, period.

The fact that he had never even remotely allowed appearances to rein in that mouth of his made her wonder.

"Finish the history," he said and turned to go.

From the bed rose a high keening sound. The patient shot bolt upright, struggling for air. Her arms beat the bed. Every breath she took rasped like nails on a chalkboard.

"She's choking! Nurse!" The nurse was already handing her the intubation tube. The sound from the patient was a steam whistle, excruciating, as air was forced through an ever more constricted throat. _Raasssppp_. Martha's eyes were wide with panic, glassy.

Then House was beside them both. He pushed her hands holding the tube away. "She doesn't need that."

The patient's eyes grew wider. _Raasssppp_. Her fingers snatched at nothing.

"It's a laryngospasm," he explained, explaining nothing. He leaned over the bed and raised his voice. "You struggling for air like this is making it worse." They were all staring at him now. _Raasssppp_. She saw the young visitor's eyes, as wide as the patient's, locked on this bizarre doctor who expressed his unconcern for a choking patient as though it were disgust. He was still leaning over Martha. He looked bored. "Stop breathing!" he commanded.

The absurdity of it shocked them all into silence. Only the keening - painful now in its harshness - went on. Then the young woman grabbed the patient's hand. Something in her eyes had changed.

"Martha, do what he says."

With a supreme effort, the woman stopped struggling. They could almost see her throat relax. The next breath she took was clear and full, without the keening sound, and she fell back on the pillow in relief.

House took his cane from where he'd deposited it on the bed. "It's not just your hands and feet spasming. Your voice box is too. Sucking in air like that collapses the vocal folds even more. They can't open up against that kind of vacuum. Next time it happens, just relax, so the muscles can unclasp. Go to sleep, pretend you already died - whatever helps."

He motioned them out of the room and the visitor followed.

Foreman caught up with them at the door. She saw his appreciative glance at the young woman, the once-over that lingered on the face. Chase was being deliberately late again, she guessed. Since House's lapdog remark the week before he'd been late to every meeting.

Foreman took the chart. "What do we know?"

"You mean, what do you know?" House took it back. "Being a half-hour late does sort of keep you in the dark, doesn't it? Also a _history_ would be nice. Do I see a show of hands?"

She turned to the young woman. "Are you a relative?"

"Just a friend. Her partner's traveling in China. She's directing a dance troupe on tour there. It'll be a while before she can get back."

"A _partner_ in China." House grimaced. "We'll need to think viral."

The woman stared at him. "You know, it's not AIDS just because she's lesbian. They're not at a higher risk -"

His gaze stopped her. The silence grew hair. In a calm voice devoid of sarcasm he asked her: "Did I tell them to test for AIDS?"

"No," she answered just as gracefully.

He looked away, ending the confrontation. "Anyone traveling abroad a lot could have exposed themselves - and their lovers - to any number of fun diseases we deprived Americans hardly ever see." He wiggled his fingers at the two of them, his sign for them to get going. "Bloodwork, tox screen. Those words mean anything to you?"

The woman was facing back toward the room and the monitor. "The numbers on that screen are going down," she said. "Is that good?"

They all turned.

Even with his leg House could move faster than any of them. "Crash cart, in here!" He tossed his cane aside and launched himself into the room. She and Foreman were moving too. "Drop the bed!" The room filled with people, competing alarms. The chaos, she knew, looked just that to anyone not trained - a million people, wires, the shouting - yet it was a kind of dance in which everyone knew his part. House had grabbed the paddles.

He made them go on when others might have given up.

Six shocks.

Seven.

Foreman: "Got a pulse!"

"One amp epi!"

"Normal sinus rhythm."

"She's back." House looked pale. He handed off the paddles.

It was then, with her mind alert and hopped on the stress, that she saw and understood. Forgotten by the crowd around the patient, he was twisting away on his good leg, looking for his cane, oblivious to where he had lost it, and she was there handing it to him, having picked it up outside, when it was the last thing anyone else would think of. The beautiful woman, who had watched him being a doctor with fascination since the moment they stepped in, who had contradicted him and then accepted his explanations with a straightforward grace that she saw now was trust. Who had urged her friend to stop breathing because he said so.

In the restroom later, she stared at herself in the mirror for a long time.

Foreman and Chase had beaten her to the conference room. "Did you catch it?" she asked Foreman. He frowned. She tried to keep her voice flippant. Just churning the rumor mill. "She's his girlfriend."

"The _patient_?"

"The visitor."

"No way."

"I saw them kiss when she left." Her voice must have betrayed her because Chase stopped double-taking between them and looked at her.

Foreman was still shaking his head. "Maybe a…long-lost niece?"

"Not a niece kiss."

Chase shrugged. "So House's got a girlfriend. We've suspected that a while. What's not to believe?"

Foreman spoke almost before she did.

"She's hot." "She's young."

Chase suppressed a wicked grin. "And here comes the cradle-robber now," he whispered.

With little to go on, the conference was brief. He seemed no more agitated than with any other case. He whiteboarded the symptoms, said "Go," and when they didn't respond, spread his arms to heaven in fake panic and yelled, "I've gone deaf!"

"Okay, hypocalcemia." "Hypoparathyroidism." "Pancreatitis."

"Which puts paid to the tetany. But she shouldn't have coded like that. We need to know what's got her heart in a wad."

Chase took it as his cue. "Come on, guys. Try hard now. This is an important case."

He frowned. "All my cases are important. What's your point?"

"Well, if we don't cure this woman, it will make a _really_ bad impression on your girlfriend, won't it?" The Aussie looked overjoyed to get a dig in.

"All my cases are important. What's your point?" The hesitation was so slight she might have imagined it.

As they left, he called her and Foreman back. "Okay, which one of you guessed?" They were silent. "Come on. Here's your chance to earn some brownie points for your powers of observation." Foreman pointed to her.

"I didn't guess," she told him. "I…saw you kissing her."

"God, you really are a moron. You should have let me think you guessed and taken the points. You just _lost_ points for being honest."

In the hall she watched a mother scold her son, a grandpa shake rain from his coat. Halloween was in two days. She would help with the party in the cancer ward, laugh at the kids' costumes. She would go home afterward and pour herself some wine. She thought again of the kiss, that moment when she had turned the corner after the restroom and seen them at the end of the deserted hall, confirming what she had already surmised. How he had bent to the woman, his hand on her shoulder so simple, so proprietary, lifting a finger to brush it along her cheek as their lips met. The look on his face. She wouldn't be able to forget that. She would rock her children and sing to them. She would run lab tests and help cure Martha and then she would go home and try very hard to be happy for him.

--------------------------------

_J._

"You going to eat that?"

"No, I bought it because I needed a doorstop."

He watched his Danish, the only thing the cafeteria did well, disappear down House's throat. "Wouldn't have stopped any doors. Too fresh."

"How's your case?"

"Fresh out of ideas." A shadow crossed his friend's face. "We fixed the hypocalcemia, the kidneys bounce back, but now the heart's dragging them down again." He sighed. "The whole thing sucks like Paris Hilton on a good day. Even if there were a viral component it shouldn't be getting worse this fast. Massive damage to the heart. Coded twice again in four days. She's up with the cards now getting a heart cath." He was biting a fingernail. "You know, Dani called me the day this woman collapsed at the theater and asked me to take the case. She's known her for years. Some kind of mentor. Got her into dance school and everything. Like a mother away from Mom. It's just…" The clatter of cafeteria trays almost drowned his next words. "It's the way Dani's been looking at me the past few days."

The depth of worry in the voice startled him. "Disappointment? She thinks you can't cure her?"

"Not at all." He looked up. Not worry. Fear. "She thinks I can. The look…. It says she has no doubt I will."

"That's good, isn't it?"

"And what if I can't?"

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He stood in the door and listened to them bandy ideas they'd gone over ten times. Their boss had pushed them and they were tired, but to give House credit he'd pushed himself too. It was almost like the old days, pre-Dani, irritability spreading through the place like an acid pool, radiating from House as the central point, from that spot on his leg he'd started rubbing again.

"It has to be autoimmune," Cameron was saying.

Foreman shook his head. "A virus."

"No. No fever."

"Then she's taken drugs." Chase's solution to everything.

"Tox screen was clean."

House tossed his cane on the table with a clatter that startled them all and ran his hands through his hair. "Dani says this woman's never touched drugs."

"What - everyone lies, except your girlfriend?"

"Yeah." He was staring off into space, not listening. "Think outside the Ecstasy tablet. Non-recreational. What if it were something she thought she was doing herself a favor with?"

"Oh, sure. Narrows it down."

Over his fellows their eyes met. The fear had become panic. "What are you doing here?"

"Just thought I'd interject a little humor and let you know she coded again."

-----------------------------------

In the long run, he knew, they would uncover what was wrong with the woman - House, born to the role of gadfly, prodding them like reluctant calves toward some answer - but the woman didn't have a long run. She had a heart that might refuse to jump-start the eighth - or tenth - time and without knowing what was causing it Cuddy would never consent to put her on a transplant list.

He stood at the glass, watching Foreman check the patient's vitals. She had shrunk, a tiny lump under the sheet, the oxygen mask she needed all the time the largest thing on her. Cameron came to stand beside him. Behind them, in the lounge area, they could hear House talking to Dani and the other visitor who had been to see the patient twice before, a starkly handsome man with a blond ponytail, small but broad-shouldered. Solid. Another dancer, Wilson assumed. The chatter in the lobby drowned their words, yet House's stance, his knuckles white on his cane, told anyone who knew him that it was an argument.

Snatches of it drifted to them. "What _are_ you doing for her?" they heard the man in the ponytail say. Dani was studying the floor. An elevator pinged and he didn't catch House's reply.

"He's in love with her." Cameron's voice at his side surprised him. She didn't usually remark on the obvious.

"I know," he said.

"God, he's beautiful." Which was just creepy. "Do you think House would introduce me to him?" He realized she had been talking about the blond man. And when he thought about it, she was right - something in the blond man's hand on Dani's elbow, the way he watched her face, said it all. House had to have noticed it too.

"I mean, he didn't even introduce his girlfriend," Cameron went on. "You'd think he was ashamed of her."

"I think he doesn't like the idea of her and his work being in the same world. He's trying to deny that."

Some breaking point had been reached in the discussion. He saw House take Dani's arm and lead her toward them, the blond man right behind them. They stopped at the glass and looked in. He appeared unaware of the others standing there, his fingers so tight on Dani's arm she would surely have bruises the next day.

"All right, tell me what I'm missing!"

For a second Dani looked frightened - not of him, but of that intensity she had probably not seen to this degree before. He wished he were close enough to whisper _Pit-bull_ in her ear.

She seemed to collect herself. Quietly she removed her lover's hand from her arm, a gesture none of them missed, and he saw the blond man's eyes on House narrow in what looked a lot like hate.

"She…lives to dance," Dani said, peering in at the woman. She seemed to understand by instinct the kind of brainstorming he was looking for. "She's afraid of losing that, of growing old. Appearance is very important to her." She was rubbing her arm. "She started gaining weight a while back and drove us all crazy worrying about it."

"When did that stop?" His expression had changed. He was on to something.

"Stop?"

The blond man caught where he was headed. "About a month ago. I noticed she stopped talking about it."

"And has since lost the weight, I bet."

"That and more."

He banged the sliding door open and marched into the room. They followed. When he pulled the woman's mask away, she began to gasp for air. She stared at him with wild eyes.

"She's in A-fib, House!" Foreman looked disgusted.

"What diet aid are you using?" House asked her.

"Not…using…anything."

"I understand. You want to look good. And you will. You'll be the slimmest person at your funeral. Fit in your shroud and everything. Just tell me what you took to lose weight."

The woman shook her head. Her eyes rolled up in her head.

"You're lying on your deathbed." He grimaced at his own pun.

Foreman grabbed the mask from him and placed it back over her. "So we should have done that housecall." His voice was low, directed away from the visitors, but they heard it anyway. House had refrained from his favorite diagnostic tool this time, Wilson knew, because he hadn't known how Dani would take it if she found out about the woman's house being searched.

"Nothing showed on the tox screen anyway," Cameron reminded them.

"Which could mean she had stopped for a while and only started taking it again after you ran the test." House's eyes were already roaming the room. "Maybe she brought a little bit of home with her." He gestured. "Go!"

Cameron and Foreman turned and started searching the locker so fast they might have been robots. Wilson found himself once again wishing he commanded that kind of loyalty, from anyone. House busied himself with the nightstand. Dani and the blond man stared as he flung open drawer after drawer, discarding personal items.

"Darf er das?" the blond man asked. Wilson recognized it as German.

"Asking if I can do this?" House said over his shoulder. He held up a cosmetic bag. "Doing it." The bag proved empty and he tossed it on the bed. "Leave the room, Gay-Org, if you don't want to watch." He threw open the next drawer. "Come to think of it, just leave the room."

A cry rose from Foreman. "Got it!" He held up a small carton. "It's all Chinese."

"Over here." Foreman tossed the carton to House. On the front was a picture of a yellow horse. The rest of the box was covered with Chinese characters.

"Ephedra," House said.

A snort of disbelief flew from the blond man. "You read Chinese, do you?"

"Sure." He turned and saw Dani's open mouth, her eyes moving between admiration and puzzlement. The click was almost visible, the Houseian wheels turning over to _Be honest_. "I read pictures," he corrected. "Yellow horse is another term for ephedra."

"Which is?"

"A Chinese herb. Great in your cold medicine. Not so hot in megadoses straight from the crude plant. Combine it with caffeine as a diet pill and you've got the perfect little grenade for your heart. No wonder hers looks like a Baghdad marketplace. Our otherwise clueless government knows that and that's why it's highly regulated here. Lover-lady thought she was doing her girlfriend a service sending back the more potent variety on her travels."

Dani was stroking the patient's arm. The woman's eyes were closed. She might have been unconscious, but a tear trickled down one cheek.

"Martha, this is what's damaging your heart."

"Has damaged it," House interjected. "Should stop progressing once she stops taking it." The silence from every doctor in the room sank in on Dani before it did the blond man. She looked around. House's eyes hadn't left her face. "Finding it also signs her death warrant."

"What does _that_ mean?" It was the blond man.

House still watched Dani. She had retreated a step from him, dropping the woman's hand. When he went on, his voice was gentle. "It means she did this to herself. No one will consent to put her on a waiting list for a heart now."

Dani stared around at all of them as though they had conspired toward this moment, then turned back to him. "Couldn't you just… I mean. Pretend you didn't find it!" She had taken the carton from him and was holding it out to Foreman. "Put it back!" No one moved. House pried the box from her. "We could just… not tell anyone, right? That committee that decides… You said you - "

His warning look bit off her words. She suddenly seemed aware of the others. If House had told her the story of how he'd lied for the bulimic woman, then he was either a fool or his trust went very deep. Wilson could see Dani thinking it through, the fact that there were too many witnesses this time. The blond man had his lips open, listening for her next word, his own wheels turning, a golden predator cat ready to pounce.

"I could try and convince the committee this was a one-time thing," House was saying. "That she didn't know the risks. That it doesn't indicate a psychological disorder. They might buy it. There are things that can be done to the heart she's got. They'll jury-rig it with a bi-vad - that'll hold her a while." His voice was rough. "But she'll never dance again."

Dani nodded.

The doctors left the dancers alone together.

In the hall he stood alone with House. "At least you found out what was wrong with her."

"There's nothing wrong with her." Which made no sense, until he saw him looking back toward Dani. "There's everything right about her." He walked away just as Dani exited the room.

She was shaking her head. She'd been crying. "You think you know a person." It seemed to be his day for ambiguities. He wasn't sure she was talking about the patient.

"There was nothing else he could do," he told her.

"I know that. I wouldn't have him risk his license. _He_ wouldn't have kept his mouth shut." She glanced through the glass at the blond man. "He hates him." Ambiguous again, but it probably applied to both men.

He couldn't help asking. "Why?"

She didn't answer. "He's still going to beat himself up about it." Her hand on his arm caused him to turn and they both watched House until he rounded the corner, cane jabbing the floor as if the floor had done him a terrible wrong. "Things are so hard when he's sad." Her hand tightened. They were conspirators. "You have to convince him I understand."

---------------------------------------------

_Wake me up inside_

_Call my name and save me from the dark_

_Bid my blood to run_

_Before I come undone_

_Save me from the nothing I've become._

G.

And so winter wandered in – the cold gnawing away at his scar while she warmed him from within. He cleared the stacked medical journals out of the long-unused fireplace and they shared wine some nights before a roaring fire, something he hadn't done since around the last ice-age. The night of the first frost in November they ended up falling asleep there – _like kids_, his last thought - wrapped in the bear rug, and when a log fell toward morning she woke startled, crying, "Not yet!" He held her. "I dreamed the world was ending," she whispered, "and I didn't want it to."

While everything froze around him something else inside was thawing.

He wondered if she had any real idea what she did for him. She had music on all the time and one song – her favorite for weeks – he took at first to be some kind of message to him every time she slotted in the CD, a chill racing through him when he first understood the lyrics, nonsense really, someone brought back from death by love, the words managing to evoke the image of a coffin – or maybe just a cardiac arrest –without saying so, yet she seemed oblivious to how well the lines fit, humming to the tune as she bustled around him without a glance his way. _My spirit sleeping somewhere cold...Breathe into me and make me real_. He felt soft everywhere then, too vulnerable.

Bring me to life.

She bought him a t-shirt she'd seen that said _No, really - the world DOES revolve around me,_ and he wore it with pride.

Save me from the nothing I've become.

At Thanksgiving he visited his parents while Dani flew to Pittsburgh to be with her family. He couldn't decide when he had last been in the House house. His parents seemed benumbed for a while to see him there, though he had called beforehand. He told his mother about Dani, just enough - no need to get too personal, she was his mother after all - and she watched him all the next day, tremulous, as if waiting for the other shoe to drop. He cracked jokes and his father laughed at one. Bad places in the house seemed to fade. It was just a house.

He thought he might be experiencing happiness.

"Going all womanish on me?"

She was curled on the bed painting her toenails, a sight he hadn't seen before. December. The hospital's annual Christmas party was the next night and he was taking her. She would never find out how long he'd debated before mentioning it at all. He hadn't been to the event himself in – well, in ever.

She daubed a toe. "I want to look good tomorrow."

"You look good tonight."

"Fashion definitely not my middle name. Gotta work at it." She'd told him those theories before, how she didn't fit in to other women's ideals of women, that they didn't like her for that reason, too blase about all the things they had to work at, hair and waistlines and home decorating. The fact that she couldn't care less about fashion. ("Why should you," he'd said. "You'd look good in rags." "I _think_ that's what they don't like," she'd replied.)

She glanced at him now. "Allow me my nervousness. Everyone's going to be oh so curious about your trophy girlfriend."

A little flutter. Anger. "Is that what you think you are?" The harsh voice startled her.

"No," she murmured. Then: "Stop that – you're going to mess up my nail polish!"

"You're a dancer. Just keep your legs up in the air."

The big night, whooo. He dressed alone, then slipped over to her place just late enough to make them late. She wore a chiffon sheath, pale-green, just off the shoulders. He thought mermaids glowed like that in cartoons.

"Wow!"

"Is it too much? Or not enough?"

"It's just right, says Goldilocks. Wearing any jewelry with that?"

"I don't know what yet."

"Try this." She gazed at the gift-wrapped package a moment before taking it.

"What have you done, Greg?"

"Just open it."

"Is this some of that money I haven't seen?"

"This is me being a sugar daddy. A little flash to drape my lady." She was grinning. "Got to decorate my trophy."

"As long as I don't have to sit up on the mantelpiece."

She looked at the necklace a long time before running a finger across the emeralds. Shock maybe. _Genuine_, he wanted to say, but even he realized that would be crass. He'd amazed himself by buying it without turning the tag over first.

Delicately she said, "Is this where I jump up and down screaming thank you and throw my arms around your neck?"

"Do that and I'm taking it back."

"Put it on me."

And as usual he proved himself sadly lacking in the really important skills like getting a necklace out of its box and around a woman's neck. She smiled as he fumbled. "Haven't done this often, have you? Which is comforting to know."

He finished. "Trophy decorated." His eyes met hers in the mirror for a second - he couldn't help himself, she glowed – but the second became a moment and oh hell, that made it a ritual, she was being _knighted_ for christsake; their eyes were saying something to each other about how important the evening was, but he wasn't having any of it. "Let's go. Your pumpkin carriage awaits."

She glowed in the taxi and in the lobby and she glowed as he held the door for her, bending to whisper, "There you go with the hair again - I _forbid_ you to be nervous," not sure who he meant, not himself of course because nothing ever made him nervous. Entrance decidedly ungrand, they were late, so half the place was already bored, the other half already drunk, reaction time slowed in either case, but then they began to congregate and for a moment he knew what it must feel like to be high-functioning autistic - too many faces soaking him up, voices grating, too curious. People had spurned him so thoroughly for the last five years that he'd forgotten how to be at the center of attention, even if it was an off-center. Made him want to just leave in disgust, but jeez mommy was there, a hand on his arm, her peopleness would do for both of them. Chase did a very satisfying chin-on-the-floor routine when he first saw her, Cuddy the gracious-brusque she was so masterful at. People outside his admittedly small circle were all of a sudden buddies needing an introduction - doctors who hardly knew him, nurses who knew him and hated him – he figured they had to have been communicating through Dani skated through it all.

He'd forgotten there would be dancing.

Cuddy with Foreman, Wilson with Cameron, Wilson with the pert-ass blonde from maternity. The possible permutations were endless.

Dani with Chase.

Salsa, Chase's choice, who had an in with the DJ, mainly because she'd sneered, "You? Salsa? Like hell." And they were good, upper bodies apart, the proud stance that made it regal, but down in the nether regions, boy, you couldn't have slipped a lab slide between them there. Not a problem. He was pretty sure she didn't go in for men until they were of an age to start shaving. Coming from the restroom later, that section of hall dim and deserted, he froze at the voices from around the corner.

"You're certainly cute enough." A weighty silence. "That accent would wow any woman."

The accent shifted, rubbed against the wall. In the lonely hall it sounded as though he'd moved closer. "So," said the accent, "what am I doing wrong?"

"I've known you for an hour, Robert. I'm supposed to figure out for you why you can't get a girlfriend?"

"I just wanted an opinion, a general impression, from someone who ought to know."

"And I gave it." More silence. "Women should be all over you. Beats me if they're not."

"How about this: my boss is so obsessive he allows me no time for a social life."

"There you go. All his fault." She laughed (his hand locked on his cane relaxing, blood flooding back to his chest because he knew that one, it said here's a man I don't take seriously, the laugh she had never directed his way. Yet.)

"Except he found time for you, didn't he? The question is what you see in him. Come on, comparison time. Differential diagnosis. What's House got that I haven't?"

"If I had to explain it you wouldn't understand."

"It's just a pity, you know. You're wasted on hi – Wait, that's _it,_ isn't it?" The Aussie chuckle held amazement. "It's _pity_. Of course. The cane and - and the bitterness. Come on, tell me I'm right. I'll go out and get myself an infarction and I'll be attractive too." (He leaned his head against the wall, eyes closed, waiting for her answer.)

Her voice was one he'd never heard before. "You are _way_ out of line." A rustle.

"No, don't go. I'm sorry – I was wrong. It's because he's such a...gentleman and – and so sexy – no, wait !" The sounds faded around the corner.

He took a roundabout way back to the party.

She was already deep in discussion with a very drunk Wilson. As he approached he heard her say Greg.

"Taking my name in vain?"

She smiled up. "James still can't figure out what I see in you." It so echoed the conversation with Chase it made him cringe. They were going to have to get past this Beauty and the Beast scenario. "He's decided it can't be the sex."

He cocked an eyebrow at Wilson. "How do you know? You've never had sex with me."

A drunken groan. "And we will keep it that way."

Hours later, the table having winnowed down to his clique (another cringe at the thought that he even had such a thing), the talk turned to medicine, or what passed for it at late hours. They would never have hung around him, he knew; it was Dani they were drawn to, moths-to-the-flame, but he didn't mind basking in the glow. He was there with her, a hand at her back; the others were trappings. It was as though they danced alone on a crowded floor. Someone mentioned his latest case.

"Whoa," Dani interjected. "you're treating a supermodel? That must be pleasant." She turned to the others. "Funny, he hasn't mentioned this to me."

"Why?" he said. "Do you think you can cure her?"

"Maybe. I've learned a lot about medicine the past few months. Doctors get off at four in the afternoon, get a call at 2 a.m in which they order more tests, preferably in a loud irritated voice, and then go back to bed. I could start practicing tomorrow."

"She had to look up nephrology," he told them, joking, but she glanced at him in surprise and more than a little embarrassment.

"I really did. Actually I typed nephology at first by mistake."

"That's a word?"

"It's the study of clouds."

"_That_ -" His eyes met Wilson's across the table – "is the coolest description of what we do that I've ever heard."

"You haven't seen this supermodel, Dani," Foreman told her, "or you'd know why he took the case." The black man's hands cupped at his chest were unambiguous.

He made a show of staring dream-lost into space. "Those babies do go all the way to the Canadian border, don't they?"

Dani was grinning at him. "I just hope for your sake, Herr Doktor, that it's a gynecological problem."

"It will be if I diagnose it right."

Cuddy gave a drunken snort. "You would think, House, now that you're getting some of your own – _sorry_ –" she nodded to Dani, " -that it would curb that lechery of yours a little."

"Oh, don't you know," Dani informed them, "I'm not _big_ enough for him." Her hands echoed Foreman's. "One of the first things he let me know."

Amid the general cries of disbelief at the appalling extent of his lechery Chase leaned across Cameron, almost falling on her, and brought his face close to Dani's. "I just want you to know," he slurred, "that chest size is not a problem with me."

Dani studied his chest. "Yes, it is."

More general hilarity. He took the moment to whisper in her ear, "I want to get you out of here. Get you home and show you chest size is not a problem with me either."

"I know that already," she whispered back, and looked at him.

He kissed her.

He knew what an exotic thing it was, there in front of others, his public displays of affection for her rarely (as in _never_) having gotten beyond a finger caressing the back of her hand beside his on a table, a strand of hair brushed from her face...some shielding mechanism reserving every possible intimacy for when they were alone. And kissing – well, lips had a lot of nerve endings. So said his logical side. He thought of the hooker, the one excruciatingly shameful memory among his many shameful hooker memories, the repeat, who was there for maybe the fourth time, a nice kid, when it struck him how long it had been since anyone had kissed him on the lips, three years since Stacy left, how the desire to feel a mouth on his had hit him so hard it left him nauseous, so that he had ended up begging her like a baby, despising himself for needing to, while she kept refusing, promising her double, triple, until she finally did and that little bit of her skin on his little bit of skin had sent feelers deeper into the pit of his being than any orgasm could have. How she had never come back. So there was something about kissing and especially about kissing Dani there now - long and lost inside it - in front of people who spent a lot of their time studying him like a bug under a microscope and with as little real affection.

"Get a room." It would have to be Wilson who would comment.

He turned from Dani. Half of them were watching, the other half studiously not watching. "Sure," he said. "Must be a broom closet around here somewhere."

"So you can get in your fifteen minutes."

"Fifteen minutes? I'll have you know we're down to eight."

Dani, always fast on the uptake: "It is the national average, James. Google it." Then to him: "Actually I think we were down to six."

"You sure?"

"I was timing it."

"Stopwatches are a wonderful invention."

They were all watching now. Wilson sighed. "You two deserve each other."

Dani beamed at him. "Why, James, that's the nicest thing anyone's ever said."

So it was important and it wasn't. It was just a party. At home she drew him toward the bedroom, unambiguous, hand clasped in his, and he drew her back.

"What is it?" she asked.

"I want to dance with you."

It might have been a movie, the romantic scene ending with the needle knocked from the record, screeeeech. Her face said it, mouth undulating from desire to disbelief. "You can't dance, Greg."

His stubborn streak reared its impish little head and he tugged her to him.

She leaned her face on his chest and sighed. "Why do you do this?"

"Do what?"

"You make everything be about your leg." He tried to sway, not about to admit it might have ruined the evening. Her body was a stone. "You know what I want from you, Greg? I want you to make love to me, and talk to me, and be there when I wake up in the mornings." She looked up and her eyes held puzzlement. "I don't want you to walk for me." As if a decision had been reached, she stepped away from him, to the stereo. "We'll do it right, then."

The music she put in was old and sappy. "No, keep your cane in your hand," she told him. "You'll want to get on and off the dance floor without looking like Quasimodo." Made it a dance lesson, to his chagrin, positioning his one free arm, and within a few minutes they swayed together, albeit woodenly, every second step more a hump of his cane than a glide. Her lips close to his: "Did you dance, before your leg?"

"Just the slow-dancing that everyone can do."

"That everyone thinks they can do."

"Point taken."

The cane made it slower than slow-dancing, more like continental-drift dancing, but they made a circuit around the room, the piano. His chest felt oddly full, an erection of the heart, that mirrored the other one further down; he knew she felt it too when her hands wandered lower to stroke his hips, and he crushed her close, the thin dress bunched between them. Any minute now he would stop this foolishness, lift her onto the back of the couch, she would wrap her legs around him, glorious end to the evening, oh but let the flaky song go on a while. She sang - badly - in his ear: _Love is like an energy rushing in, rushing inside of me. _She sang, _I'm so in love with you_.

----------------------------------

_D._

She was so in love with him.

He was a puzzle being pieced together with tender care, gone over so many times he had mapped himself onto her mind. She had seen another side of him when he was treating Martha, how the obsession she had always watched from the outside came to be applied in practice, the pit-bullheadedness, heedless of privacy or convention, how it repelled anyone who came near him. She had absorbed it, even loved it, just another piece of the puzzle locked in.

Some days she thought she had him figured out.

He hated parties, a truth she had seen at Christmas in the way he'd damped down in the onslaught of the hospital crowd, his hand against the small of her back all evening, playing almost unconsciously with the sash there, only boisterous again in the more immediate circle around the table, and so it was natural that he would despise a raucous New Year's bash thrown by dancers. And yet there they were. Too much music, Georg's high-ceilinged uptown apartment like a nautilus shell, amplifying the sound through rooms that spiraled and led back into one another. And he hated her friends, the exception being Arturo the Chilean, with his wide-open South American humor, who made him laugh by calling him a _matasanos_ and trying to waltz with him every time he saw him. No, he was there because she asked him to. One hand on his cane, the other at her elbow, until the dancing started, when he found a chair to straddle backward and watch. He was in top form, clear-eyed (she had gotten good at noting the subtle glassiness, the pupils not quite meeting hers, that spelled two Vicodin). Someone broke the mirror left leaning fashionably against the wall, Georg cursing in German and swearing to them it had been an antique, until Greg's voice cut across the crowd: "Ikea dynasty, twenty-first century - that'll cost ya!" and the moment had passed. When Georg asked her to dance, in German no less, she shook her head.

"Go on." Greg's voice at her ear startled her.

"I don't need to dance." She hadn't forgotten his indifferent, stunned look when she'd danced with Robert Chase at the Christmas party.

"Are you disobeying a direct order?"

"Nein, mein Herr."

He drew closer to whisper. "You may think I don't like watching you dance with other men and you're right, but I like watching you dance. Do me the favor."

She let Georg lead her away.

It was a mistake.

He caught her later as she returned from the bathroom. The bedroom hadn't changed, iconic macho furnishings, blue silk sheets on the huge bed. He blocked her way, trapping her against the dresser. She put her hands on his chest, a slight pressure, and they stood like that, as though poised for the first beat of a dance performance.

"Please don't start." His apartment was a tactical nightmare, any room approachable by several others, and one part of her noted the door to the dark hall had stayed open just the tiniest crack. "Someone could come in."

"Just a question, Dani." He spoke in German again, pronouncing her name with the long Ah so that it sounded like Donny, which always reminded her pleasantly of her father. He'd taken his hair down at some point, long blond strands falling near her face as he leaned in. She should have known he had drunk enough to be in one of his moods, his eyes had said it while they danced, but she'd ignored them. "You owe me an answer, for the sake of us."

"There's no us, Georg. There hasn't been for a year. When does it stop? When do you see you can't keep doing this?" Her own German sounded foreign to her, the year since they'd been a couple having rung so many changes that emotion no longer fit the language, his body - though she danced with it every day - that of a stranger.

"I'd just like to know - I need to know…what it is about him. Why?"

She remembered what she had said to Robert Chase. _If I have to explain it, you wouldn't understand_. Yet she found herself wanting to explain it to Georg, as she might have a child, and she moved her fingers down to hold his wrists where his hands, knuckles white, pressed either side of the dresser, pinning her in. When she looked up, she could almost see Greg's face superimposed on his, the thought making her voice when she spoke gentle.

"I'm in love, that's all, Georg. For the first time in my life, I'm truly in love." From his look, she knew her own face must have shone with every bit of that emotion.

_(...and something red and hot plowed across her chest, her throat, an iron taste in her mouth, oh it was despair, disappointment, her leg crushed by his weight though he hadn't moved, all of her in pain…)_

It was gone again. The sensation left her breathless, so at odds with what she had just been feeling it made her think of schizophrenia. Georg, seeing her confusion though not understanding it, took the chance to press against her and kiss her, blocking out the light, the door, even that strange momentary flash that still warped her thoughts, and for a moment, out of pity, she let him (pity would be her downfall), not kissing back, before easing him away.

She found Greg in the kitchen, entertaining a small crowd with the bloodier stories from his career. He barely glanced at her. She'd heard the tales before, though the diseases appeared to grow more fiendish with each telling. By the time they were ready to leave he had admirers. They looked at him differently. It let her risk a joke at his expense when Arturo teased him at the door. "Watch out," she said. "He'll beat you up with his cane."

Snow had dusted the town golden in the light of sodium lamps. They drove in silence, snowflakes beating against the windshield, and the silence sank in on her slowly, the gist of his face never turning to look at her. After a while she took a breath and asked: "Is it the cane remark you're mad about?"

For a second he looked merely puzzled. "What remark?"

Silence. The snow made a fairy world, yellow glitters of other cars' headlamps and one red orb growing larger and larger because he wasn't braking and she gasped, her cry "That light's red!" snapping him out of his awful reverie too late. He slammed the brakes, spun them into the intersection. Her heart flipped. Cross traffic screamed. A BMW swerved to miss them, horn dopplering away. Lights and noise and the end of the world.

They skidded sideways to an icy stop, the bumper kissing a lamppost with just the slightest thump.

Slowly, their hearts relaxed. Her fingers had grabbed the dashboard so hard they felt broken. She could hear him beside her still breathing hard. That they hadn't been hit gave a new definition to miracle. The snow outside continued to fall, impervious.

"We." She started again. "I. … We should see if the car's all right."

"_Forget the damn car!_"

It was like another tailspin. The rage in his voice crashed against her and dopplered away. They sat, not looking at one another, stunned again by the sound and the silence after it. She found her mind sorting memories in a kind of gibberish, trying to think of a time he had ever yelled at her.

He backed up and drove home.

And when he blocked her at his apartment door, mumbling something about being tired, it was as though the crash she'd held her breath against ever since they spun out had finally reached them. In desperation she pushed past him, ignoring his vexed look, watched him hang his coat half off the sofa and pour himself a scotch. "I'm going straight to bed," he told her.

"You're having a drink. So you can take the time to tell me what you're mad about."

"We can talk in the morning."

From across the street the winking red bar sign she always hated made the apartment garish. He switched on the end-table lamp and she saw the same stunned look he had worn when she danced with Chase, the pretense of indifference. His face frightened her.

"Is this about Georg?" Silence. "Are you mad because I danced with him? Because he spoke German to me?"

"Noooo." Placating (my, wasn't she silly?). "I'm not mad because Gay-Org spoke German to you." His hand clutching his drink on the desk jerked, scotch sloshing out, and he moved the glass back and forth in the spill. "I'm mad –" he turned, his voice huge, "- because he's _fucking_ your _cunt_!"

Crash. She hadn't braced for that one, hadn't even seen it coming. Forgotten her seatbelt. "_No._" He turned away. "I'm not sleeping with Georg. Oh _god_, Greg, no."

It was almost a relief. That astuteness of his had sensed something between them and homed in on it. Assumed the wrong thing (for how long?) and had been devastated by it. All she had to do was clear it up.

"I'm not sleeping with anyone but you, Greg."

"Don't lie. I get enough of that at work."

The pain was like an aura around him. He was crooked again though he stood ramrod straight, as bent as the first time she'd seen him, the unkinking that had seemed to expand him the last few months all gone in an instant. She wanted to touch him and didn't dare.

All she had to do was clear it up.

"I…I should have told you this. Georg and I were a couple a year ago. It lasted all of six weeks. I broke it off. You're…you're just picking up the vibes of that, but there's nothing there."

"I saw you in the bedroom."

_The open door._ A tingle crept across her forehead.

"So Georg hits on me every now and then. He's still in denial about it all. I can't help that –"

His voice was deathly calm. "I saw your face."

(_something red and hot plowing across her chest, her throat, an iron taste in her mouth, despair_)

The thought of him there at the door, watching her presumed tryst with Georg, watching her face glow with emotion while his world crumbled, left her numb, one part of her mind rummaging for an answer, wanting to cry out, _But I was telling him about you!,_ the other part simply shutting down, the thought that she might have _felt what he had felt _so bizarre that she blocked it from her mind as though it had never happened.

He was studying his drink. "Look." His anger seemed to have dissipated. They might have been discussing minor surgery and it made his next words all the more inconceivable. "I'm a coward. I can't take pain. That's been proven and we all know it. This – if I have to be unsure of you all the time, never knowing where I stand… Well, I just couldn't take it. Would rather not take it. It's like a kind of arrhythmia, Dani. Too hard on the…" He bit back the word. "So I'd rather you just leave. Be easier for everyone."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, just - go away and don't come back." She stood frozen, unbelieving. "Go on, go to him."

And here was the extent of the crash, worse than anyone had thought, mangled bodies, sirens all dying at once. His matter-of-factness, he was a doctor, after all, triage his thing. Then the answer burst from her. "I get it! This is one of your tests, isn't it! If I walk out, I fail, or – or what? You can't want to end this just because of a wrong assumption about Georg. It's all just a test - right?"

He made a sound like a public alarm system. "Beeep. This is not a test." Then grew serious again. He sounded tired. Only the glass moved, back and forth, smearing the spill. "Don't make it harder than it is. I need to watch out for myself, Dani. I need to survive. And I can't do that if I have to go through this all the time. Yeah, it'll hurt and I'll be lonely. But it will be easier in the long run. I'm not a strong person. Just do me the favor, will you, and get out."

She was breathing hard, the end of a dance gone terribly wrong, no one clapping. When she took a step toward him he leaned away into the desk, chin jutting as though to ward her off.

"No," she told him. "I don't believe you. I'm not leaving. I refuse." She sounded hysterical even to herself.

And something in his eyes hardened. "Come on, don't pretend it would matter to you." They might have been blue marbles. "You think I don't know what this is, Dani? What it's always been?" Whatever he was building to frightened her. She shook her head uselessly. "You're some kind of wound freak." The words fell inside her, meaningless. "Really get off on the crippled guy, don't you? Don't give me that face. I've known it ever since the first night. You had to force yourself not to look at it until I gave you permission. Someone like you doesn't go for someone like me out of the blue. I should be so lucky. The hottest you ever get is when I'm in pain. And Chase, boy, he hit a nerve, didn't he? You had to leave him standing in the hall before he could see it in your face."

_You__ make it all about your leg._ "Have you gone insane?" she whispered. Her throat felt caught in a vise. She held a hand at her neck, her own heartbeat small and cold.

"You've been screwing the leg the whole time and we both know it. So don't act like you'd be giving up a lot."

"For God's sake, Greg, you can't really think this –"

"And don't worry, I've seen it before. Don't quite get the turn-on, but I assume it's all about the pity and some twisted need to be superior. That's you, isn't it? Miss Physically – Perfect." Little words were coming out of her, _no_ and _stop_. He ignored them. "Cameron had it too, except for her it was the psychological limp instead of the real one. I was broken and she was going to fix me. For you it's just the limp." His eyes were glittering with the release of some long-held tension. He motioned with his cane. "You know, I should have fucked you with this, you'd have gotten more out of it."

He might as well have hit her. She gasped, air all gone, one arm clutched around her stomach.

"Point being, I can do without your…ministrations. Go to any hospital and attach yourself to some war veteran. An amputee maybe. Just leave me alone."

And now she was crying, hating herself for it, for having to wipe her face with her palms and sleeves while he watched her with narrowed eyes. Everything lay numb inside, this was it now, the end of the crash, life draining away. Either he meant it or it was the pain lashing out. Either there was something she could say or there was nothing. She felt paralyzed. She wished he would really hit her, anything rather than spout this insanity. The fact that he could say it, whether he believed it or not, hurt worse than any fist.

She found enough voice to speak. "You really are crippled, aren't you?" His hand tightened on his cane. "You're crippled in your mind. I don't know why I didn't see it a long time ago."

They stood that way for awhile, statues, and then he said: "What part of 'get out' did you not understand?"

The don't-come-back part, she wanted to cry. He couldn't have meant that part, and when she looked up she saw that he had. He wanted her gone, because it was easier for him. He was in pain and the treatment was to toss her out. It didn't matter if it was the right treatment. We'll try this, his stony eyes told her, if it kills us both, we'll know I was wrong.

One last breath. "Greg, please don't do this."

"_Go._"

She turned and stumbled out. Backpack, keys. Her apartment was cold. She tried to hang her coat and missed the hook because a coat of his that he'd forgotten hung there and it was all too much, so heavy, as though she embraced all that was him, an armful she would have to dump at his door, coat and key and the CD of Steve Howe, a necklace, but she was sobbing by then. It wasn't the things at all.

It was the story. She had always cried – not sobbing like this, the shuddering wheezing wails, rocking back and forth on the sofa – just little-girl tears leaking out at the darkest point in the movie and her father had always told her (his strong voice wrapping her now): if you think you know at the start of something how it will end, then you're either very smart or very foolish. She couldn't have imagined this end. It was no end, too abrupt, a blank screen. Trying to push it into the next day, the next week or month, was unbearable. Would they pass each other in the hall as if they'd never known each other?

Would he look at her?

She had lost out to the pills.

It was her one certainty – that they were at fault. She had always seen it when he couldn't, the addiction siphoning off his natural strength, making him react insanely to things. She had argued with him about it before, cajoled and pleaded in the face of his stubbornness, god they hadn't spoken for a full day once. Never demanded. Maybe she should have.

Too late.

Every new thought shook her, until there was nothing left to cry. Quiet descended. She became aware of a sound. For a moment she took it to be her own hiccupping heart, but it was far too slow. A thump, and half a minute later, another.

When she heard the faint moan, she rushed to the wall, appalled at her own trembling, and put her ear close to listen.

The next thump was loud, sustained. Objects falling. The cry was pain.

Thoughtless – beyond thought – she ran, scrabbling for his key, and burst into his apartment. At first she didn't see him. The light was crazy. The glass of scotch had shattered on the floor. Another groan. He was lying behind the sofa flat on his face, but by the time she reached him - screaming "What are you doing?" - he was on his knees, then he was standing. He looked wild: cold and sweating, face clenched.

"I'm walking, dammit!"

"_What?_"

As she watched in horror, he placed all his weight on his bad leg and it simply crumpled as though it were paper, pitching him to the floor again while he cried out in pain. He fell headlong, like an uncoordinated child not even putting his hands out to catch himself. She tried to think how many times he'd done it already, how many thumps she'd heard. He was already getting up again.

"_Stop!_"

"Get out! I told you to leave me alone!"

"I'm not gonna let you do this -"

"I never want to see your stupid face again!" The next attempt knocked a stack of journals over. She was sobbing again. In a cold frenzy she remembered he'd taken none of the pills that evening. The pain had to be hideous.

The next try threw him against the lamp and it crashed to the floor. Shards of bulb and china strewed the space in front of him. When he hauled himself to his feet, eyes focused on nothing, she knew all of a sudden what she was seeing – an animal in a trap, and like an animal, she realized, he wasn't going to stop; the panic reached her throat and she started screaming, "Nein, _nein, nein_ –" but the animal wasn't listening. She dropped to her knees and began frantically brushing the broken fragments aside, crying "Wait, you'll cut yourself!" - trying to clear a space even as he stepped into it.

And for half a second he stood, poised on his right leg, face manic with glee, and then fell, no sound this time, just air exploding from his lips, his face so white she thought the pain must have broken him at last, but he was already dragging himself into a sitting position against the piano leg, readying himself to stand.

She crawled on top of him.

For a moment he seemed almost strong enough to lift himself in spite of her weight, heaving upward as her legs tightened around his waist, but the pain had weakened him. He tried to throw her off sideways then, thrusting at her, both yelling, though hers were sobs. In the din she could hear only herself: "You're _mine_, you belong to me! I'm not gonna let you break yourself –"

One flailing arm caught her hard on the side of the head. She hardly noticed. It might have been a caress.

And yet – stunned silence. His face seemed to melt – shock at himself. "_No._" As if coming back to consciousness he saw what he had done. "No no no –" He touched her head, "I'm _sorry_ –" then he was hugging her, or they were hugging each other, rocking, his arms so hard they crushed the breath from her.

Later she would recall it as not being his voice at all – the plea, a low moan, as though a stranger crouched behind her and did the whispering, or some small imprisoned person inside him, a child through a keyhole, words that almost didn't register, faint as the wind, as they sat there rocking:

"Help me..."

It poured out of her. They would get him off the pills, it was what was messing with his head making him crazy insane to think she could want another man not Georg not anyone else and they would do it together if they had a plan a slow reduction get Wilson to help before the addiction tore them apart it would all work and everything would be different – his lips on hers stopped her. He was nodding, murmuring Yes to it all, still rocking her, stroking her hair, and when he opened his eyes she saw that he didn't believe it for a second.

Much later she slid off him, extricating herself from his crushing arms. He stood shakily and sank onto the piano bench. She sat beside him, both with their hands nerveless in their laps, no impulse left for motion. He wasn't looking at her. Ashamed, she realized. He took the bottle of Vicodin from his jacket pocket, rattled it, and set it on the piano. "I'll say this one time," he told her. "This is not about – _that_." He indicated the bottle. We'll…try what you said. But I'm not kicking it. Not you, not anyone, is going to cure me. You believing _you_ can will just…kill everything we have. When I'm not able to get off the stuff, you'll start to hate yourself. You'll tell yourself you weren't enough to be the one to finally do it for me and you'll ask yourself why. It'll be like a constant infusion of poison – doesn't he love me enough, what am I doing wrong –"

"I'm not an idiot."

"You could be Einstein and fall into that kind of trap. I just want to hear you say it: it's not going to work."

"It's not going to work. Now I want to hear you say you believe me about Georg."

He sighed and stared away a long time. "A year ago, huh?" She waited. After a moment he nodded. It was the most non-committal nod she could imagine. The other thought – _Say you don't believe the things you said _– she couldn't bring herself to speak.

"The pain is real." She realized he meant his leg. "No one believes that. Maybe the pills do change my personality. But everyone telling me how I should quit the stuff just shouts out: Hey, we want you to suffer like hell - a little torture never hurt anyone."

"No!" He finally looked at her. "Do you think I want you to go through that?" She hadn't thought she had more tears, but they were starting again. "If I could take your pain on me, Greg, I would, this very second." It was a child's prayer, simplistic and yet utterly sincere.

"No, you _wouldn't_. Don't say that. Oh, you might, for an hour or a day, but then you'd come crawling, _begging _to give it back." His fist came down on the piano keys. "Anyone would."

"Then I'd take half of it!" So childish he burst out laughing, a half-sob.

"Oh, _right_. Or maybe one-third. How about 22 percent?" He laid his forehead on the keys with a discordant bang, the laugh scaling to a moan. "Oh, god, I think I'm in love with you."

And then, watching him later as he bagged his hidden stashes to be turned over to Wilson (the sheer number of them daunting, two bottles inside the piano alone, which might have been comical if it weren't sad), she thought about how substantial the white pills seemed, rocks like immovable worlds in the cup of his hand that still shook, always growing denser while he seemed to her, in that moment, so insubstantial. If he were sand he would be trickling through her fingers now. She would have to hold him, hold him together just as hard as she could. It was the start of a new year, and she was strong.

"Hi, Dani. Why the phone call?"

"I need your help. You know Greg's trying to get off the Vicodin. He – uh -has told you, hasn't he? He was supposed to."

"First I've heard of it. Since when?"

"Well, since – big fight. Native revolt, two suns ago. Squaw almost burn white man at stake."

"I see. Kudos to you. No one else could even get him to try."

"Hold your kudos till we see if it works."

"I find myself holding my kudos a lot when it comes to him."

"I hope not in front of your patients."

A chuckle. "Bad timing though. Now that Stacy's moving back here."

A long pause. "First I've heard of it."

"She and her husband are separating. Not that you need to worry, Dani, competition-wise. It's just that – well, if she contacts him at all, it'll probably depress the hell out of him. Dredging up the past, that kind of thing. Make it harder to kick the addiction. So what can I do?"

"Spy on him for me, James. Make sure he doesn't take more than he says."

"More kudos. My hat is off, as I perceive you do not trust him on this."

"Not any farther than I could throw his piano." _But then I know how his leg hurts. Because I've felt it._

For one second.

---------------------

End of Chapter 3

Lyrics by Evanescence, _Bring Me to Life_; Frankie Goes to Hollywood, _The Power of Love_.

Any medical idiocies are mine. Thanks for reading.


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